Montreal City Weblog

Kate 07:47 on 2019-06-19 Permalink Reply  

• Faiz Imam 11:12 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Well yeah, right now EVs make up about 2% of vehicle sales.

  Its a chicken and egg issue. If we want more people to buy them and use them, they’ll need places to charge.

  If we are seriously electrifying our entire economy, we will need thousands of these chargers eventually.

  A bigger problem is how to best manage our use of these chargers.

  Right now they serve as both chargers and multi hour parking spaces, which means only a few of them can be used each day. And they’ll often sit idle once the car is fully charged up.

  I don’t know how well it works downtown streets, but in parking lots I’ve seen EVs park in a spot in the morning and be there all day.

• Ephraim 12:23 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  First of all, too many of these are 240V AC and not 400V DC, which leads to the question of if they will change these, since obviously cars that can charge on DC charge faster. For example, the GM volt was only at 3.6kw and took 4.5h to charge. They moved it up on newer models to 7.2kw and takes only 2.3h to charge. But a Nissan Leaf at 7.2kw is about 6h to fully charge…. bump it up to DC charging at 400V and assuming you have 50kw, you should be charge in less than an hour. Of course, you are paying (on the flo network) about $11.50 an hour for a 400V DC charge… and the GM cars can’t take that charge… they are slow charge.

  Tesla is currently at 150kw in pairs or 72kw per individual, but they are moving to 250kw per individual charger (part of the ramp up to pickup trucks and zero emission trucks). Assuming the Model 3 battery is 62kwh, that means that at 250kw we are talking about 20 minutes to an 80% charge (it slows after that). Tesla charges a per minute charge for their chargers, which are 44c per minute at 60kW and 22c per minute below 60kW. Assuming you are on the higher charge with a 62kwh battery from 20% to 80% is 36 minutes of charging (about $16). But they charge an idle fee, if you don’t move your car within 5 minutes of finishing. That’s 65c a minute in Canada if it’s just sitting there. If the station is full, that’s $1.30 a minute.

  These public chargers aren’t charging for idle time… it’s like getting parking at $1 per hour instead of $3… though some charge both fees…. so it’s $4 an hour.

  (Disclosure, I am now on the Tesla Destination Charger network… I have 2 chargers, but they only work for Tesla cars…. most of the other cars use J1772 240V chargers. The DC chargers are on SAE and CHAdeMO.) Have we confused you enough with all the charging information?

• Raymond Lutz 17:54 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  Charging should be free, as discovered by the study “Consumer behavioral adaption in EV fast charging through pricing” (Yutaka Motoaki, Matthew G. Shirk, 2017). They concluded that “a flat-rate fee has a negative effect on the usage efficiency of DCFC stations.” When people are paying, they tend to stay too long at the charger. And after about 80% the charge rate decreases exponentially (Yes, Kate) so the high power charger pass that threshold is not efficiently used. Pour ceux interessés, j’ai rédigé un texte ‘grand-public’ sur le processus de charge CC-CV, il est publié sur un forum de l’AVEQ (l’Association des véhicules électriques du Québec).

• Faiz Imam 19:06 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  I agree there is a valid debate that can be had over the cost of charging up a car. But the key point I think we all agree on is that once your car is mostly topped up, then there needs to be significant penalties to limit overstay.

• Chris 21:21 on 2019-06-19 Permalink

  “Charging should be free” -> Strong disagree here. That would be subsidizing cars. Don’t fall for the greenwashing about electric cars being “green”. Cars get way too many subsidies already, we should be subsidizing them less, not more.

• Raymond Lutz 07:15 on 2019-06-20 Permalink

  Subsidizing? You mean subsidized like the 3.3 G$ we give annually to the oil industries? Talking about policies, I don’t care at what level (muni, provincial or federal) infrastructure is being deployed, financed and maintained. The argument “but its federal” or “but its provincial” is moot. Beside, everything should be subsidized: yes I’m a fucking lunatic pinko socialist.

  And you’re right about the ecological footprint of cars (electric or thermal): they are an enormous waste of resource and emit loads of pollutants (debilitating us like PM2.5 from brakes and tires wear). We will eventually ban individually owned car like we banned wood stoves (or tax them to oblivion), replacing them with transportation as a service (TAAS). “aucune transition écologique ne se fera sans contrainte. Il est temps de le dire, et de le dire clairement.“

• Faiz Imam 10:25 on 2019-06-20 Permalink

  Chris. I’m very much in favor for making driving harder, but I also want to incentivize EVs.

  Charging a EV doesn’t cost too much electricity, and I think the marketing message of the low cost is a major way to attract users.

  But at the same time you are right that we don’t want to overly subsidize driving. So I think the compromise it to attack parking, which is the major underlying issue.

  If you make parking much more difficult, it doesn’t matter if the charging is subsidized. You still greatly modify behavior while still shifting to EV cars.

• Ephraim 14:58 on 2019-06-20 Permalink

  The legacy car manufacturers are using too slow a charging system…. and it tends to clog up the system. There are just 8 CHAdeMO/SAE charging spots in Montreal. So other than some Japanese EVs and some Teslas, these 240V charging spots are essentially parking spots for 4 to 8 hours at a time. And since the chargers only charge by the hour…. and it’s cheaper than the meters, people tend to stick to them. It’s $1 an hour… no idle fees.

  So anytime you think that GM and Ford are actually trying to successfully compete with their EV cars, you need to realize that they are far behind the curve. Years behind the curve… maybe even a full decade behind the curve. They are fine as a city car, but they need a parking space or a garage because you are constantly needing to top up.

  Take a car that can fast charge (Tesla or Japanese), someone travelling 25K a year…. the range is 400km and you charge at 20% and stop at maybe 80% (for efficiency) that means that you are adding 240km per charge. So that’s 300km a week, they need to charge 1.25x per week or 65 times a year. On a fast charge that’s about 60 hours a year in charging time…. put it down to 32A and that’s 520 hours of charging. Have an older GM car and that’s over 1000 hours of charging.